American politics

The end of Chris Dodd

YEARS from now, historians will puzzle over why Chris Dodd—a powerful senior senator from Connecticut—decided to stake his future on a Democratic presidential bid. Mr Dodd's humiliating performance (he withdrew the night of the Iowa caucus) followed a temporary move from his home state to Iowa, and an emptying of his campaign accounts, which set him up for this:

Christopher Dodd's standing with Connecticut voters continues to plunge as a new poll released Thursday shows only one in three people approve of his job performance... The poll also found Dodd trails his two announced Republican challengers, former GOP Congressman Rob Simmons and Connecticut state Sen. Sam Caligiuri.

It's voter anger over the AIG bonuses that's really doing in Mr Dodd, but his curious political judgment over the past two years had softened up his support. The problem for Republicans, as Ramesh Ponnuru points out, is that this is Connecticut, and there is no shortage of Democrats to replace Mr Dodd. The favoured contender would be Richard Blumenthal, the state attorney general who is basically the polar opposite of Mr Dodd, an omnipresent critic of the state's huge corporations. This is a good sign of just how quickly America is turning against the Masters of the Universe.

Readers' comments

Absent a sex or money scandle, it's hard to believe Dodd would refuse to run again, or that a primary challenger would succeed. As for the Republican challengers? They'd better be pro-choice moderates if they want to defeat a Democratic incumbent in the NorthEast

I tend to think that the upper tiers of government are largely granted on hereditary and felonious grounds and most of us can't distinguish between the able and the unable most of the time. Occasionally, though, circumstances conspire to require merit. I wish Dodd well in another career of his choosing, but I think he failed that test. If it is, in fact, the AIG bonuses that pull him down, that's evidence that even faced with urgent challenges, voters prefer petty irrelevancies to vote on.